What is 'virtual reality' and how is it changing the way we see the world?

He says: “Although the term 'virtual reality' wasn't coined until 1989, head-mounted displays similar the today's VR headsets have been in use by the military since the late 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Jeffrey Shaw and Charlotte Davies started to explore the artistic possibilities of VR, but it's only in the last few years that VR headsets (and computers powerful enough to make them work) have become cheap enough to be purchased by Fine Art courses like the one that Kayleigh studies on at Leeds Beckett.

“What is happening with VR art at the moment is similar to what happened when the extortionately expensive synthesisers of the 1970s dropped in price in the 1980s: the big-budget extravagance of classically trained prog-rock god Rick Wakeman gave way to a more interesting application of technology-based creativity by bands like Depeche Mode. Today, VR artists no longer have to rely on corporate sponsorship or collaborations with computer science departments. Although VR technologies are not new, they are newly available to artists, like Kayleigh, who have the time, the curiosity and the desire to make new types of art.”

What is your area of research?

In my academic research I use a wide range emerging digital technologies to invent new ways to create art. Most recently, I've been using virtual reality technologies such as the HTC Vive headset and the games design software Unity to expand what painting can be in the 21st century. In my VR artworks I scale up my digital paintings to the size of a large farm, forming valleys and hills of digital 'paint' that users can leap across. Rather than showing my art in traditional galleries, I distribute them via the online games marketplace, Steam. I share some of the ideas and insights that emerge from these experiments with my academic colleagues through more traditional routes such as conference presentations. My research feeds directly into my teaching at Leeds Beckett and helps me to support students like Kayleigh who share my excitement about the creative possibilities that new technologies offer.

Is Kayleigh breaking new ground? If so, how?

Kayleigh has been engaging with virtual reality technologies since her first year on the Fine Art course at Leeds Beckett. Her knowledge of VR had become so well developed towards the end of her first year that I invited her to be a guest on a panel discussion that I was chairing at virtual reality conference. Kayleigh confidently shared her experience of being a VR artist with an audience of academics and industry professionals and received very positive feedback. The story that she told about becoming totally terrified by one of her own VR artworks went down particularly well.

Throughout her second and third years on the Fine Art course, Kayleigh has continued to develop her technical skills and has made important connections with key players in the VR industry, including the inventor of TiltBrush, the VR painting software that Kayleigh uses to create her artworks. Because Kayleigh has been able to develop her VR-based art practice in tandem with the development of her critical thinking skills on the Fine Art course, her artworks expertly synthesise the medium-specific aspects of virtual reality with the more conceptual concerns that relate to this technology. What makes Kayleigh's work particularly ground-breaking is the way that she has integrated performance art into her VR experiences. Fine Art at Leeds Beckett has a very strong research-base in performance art, with many of Kayleigh's tutors engaging in world-leading research and practice in this field. The enthusiasm and knowledge of Kayleigh's tutors has helped her to expand her VR art far beyond the purely visual and technical. Kayleigh creates art-forms that use performance as a way of probing and sign-posting the deeper cognitive, social and bodily processes that happen when we don a VR headset.

What's the future for Kayleigh and VR?

The field that Kayleigh is engaging with is growing at an exponential rate and is already a major global economic driver. The technology sector is necessarily dominated by engineering thinking, but as we have seen at Apple, when art and engineering meet as equal partners, amazing things happen. As an individual artist or as part of a team of techno-pioneers, Kayleigh has the capacity to use the creative, technical and analytical skills she has developed on the Fine Art course at Leeds Beckett to create a richer and more interesting world. Over the next few years augmented reality technologies will become commonplace, overlaying digital images onto our everyday world via stylish eye-glasses. Kayleigh has just started experimenting with this mixing up of digital and physical realities, and I can see great potential for her to apply the knowledge and skills she has developed at Leeds Beckett to AR as it permeates our lives. Of course, we need to ask important ethical questions when such new technologies emerge, but artists like Kayleigh will also ask particularly interesting questions about AR. Kayleigh and her generation of digital artists will craft their own unique VR and AR artistic responses, pushing the boundaries of what is possible and what is desirable.

Are you excited about this project?

I am excited to work with students that understand new technologies from a totally different perspective to mine. I started making digital images in 1981 on a Sinclair ZX81 home computer, and I never cease to be flabbergasted by each new technology that comes along. Students like Kayleigh have a deep intuitive understanding of the digital realm due to their immersion in advanced technologies from birth. Each new cohort of students bring a more advanced version of what they consider to be 'normal' technologies, and when their post-digital perspectives collide with the artistic expertise of tutors on the Fine Art course at Leeds Beckett, amazing and original things happen. Kayleigh's work is a great example of it happening this year, but it happens every year, and that perpetuates my excitement.